


Nelson's Thread

by Ankaret



Category: Marlow series - Forest
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-13
Updated: 2009-12-13
Packaged: 2017-10-04 09:40:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ankaret/pseuds/Ankaret
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Written for the <a href="http://community.livejournal.com/trennels/profile"><img/></a><a href="http://community.livejournal.com/trennels/"><b>trennels</b></a> third annual drabble challenge, for <a href="http://lizarfau.livejournal.com/profile"><img/></a><a href="http://lizarfau.livejournal.com/"><b>lizarfau</b></a>'s prompt: <i>The Marlows' "cousin who practised her pretty wiles on the unsuspecting grown-ups" either a) is sent to Kingscote or b) turns up to spend the holidays at Trennels</i>.  Many thanks to Owl for beta-reading!</p>
    </blockquote>





	Nelson's Thread

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [](http://community.livejournal.com/trennels/profile)[**trennels**](http://community.livejournal.com/trennels/) third annual drabble challenge, for [](http://lizarfau.livejournal.com/profile)[**lizarfau**](http://lizarfau.livejournal.com/)'s prompt: _The Marlows' "cousin who practised her pretty wiles on the unsuspecting grown-ups" either a) is sent to Kingscote or b) turns up to spend the holidays at Trennels_. Many thanks to Owl for beta-reading!

_'And the knights are no more and the dragons are dead' - Blyth Power, When A Knight Won His Spurs_

It was Ann, deputising for their flu-ridden mother, who opened the letter at breakfast. "Oh, how lovely," she said; and then, peering over her very new glasses as she read downwards, "Do you think we could put her in Kay's old bedroom?"

Lawrie dropped her knife with a clatter. "Who?" she asked apprehensively. "Grandmother?"

Her brother and sisters looked at her, united in wonder that _even Lawrie_ could think that _even Ann_ might greet the sudden descent of their grandmother upon Trennels with 'Oh, how lovely'. Peter was the first to recover. "Get on with it, gel," he said to Ann, whose smile had sagged from bonny certainty to disconcertment. "Is the Queen coming to visit?"

"She can't come this week," said Rowan easily, joining in the joke. "Tell her to come the week after next, and I'll tie a ribbon across the door of the new combine and she can cut it. Or maybe the Bank ought to decide who cuts it, considering that it's their combine after all."

"It's her bank," said Lawrie. "Or is that just the Bank of England?"

Nicola would have enlightened her; but she didn't actually know for _certain_ herself, and she did vaguely care who came to stay, she supposed, even if it was only some dire school-friend of Ann's own. "Who is it, then?" she asked gruffly.

"It's _Mitzi_," said Ann in the manner of one promising a treat. "You remember. _Cousin_ Mitzi. Cousin David's daughter."

"How many other Mitzis are there out there, for pete's sake?" growled Peter, earning himself an unamused glance as cold as a winter flagstone floor from Rowan across the corner of the table. "What's she doing back from America? Did they decide she was an undesirable alien?"

"No, her parents are splitting up, poor things," said Ann; and blushed, because she was the sort of person who _did_ blush over other peoples' divorces. "I'm sure Mummy won't mind, aren't you?"

"_I'll_ mind," said Lawrie darkly.

"Oh, Lawrie, don't be such a baby," said indulgent Ann. Lawrie mimed affrontment.

"Why shouldn't she be a baby? I'm sure Mitzi will," said Ginty. She had meant it for the light-as-air savagery for which she was particularly famed among her own set at school; but it came out lumpen and unpleasant, as if the shade of Cousin Mitzi were hovering over the room like the milk-souring kind of bad fairy. "Seriously, Ann, don't _you_ remember what she was like? All simpering up to the grown-ups and holding their hands and prattling on about fairies?"

"Because you never did anything like that yourself, of course," said Peter pleasantly. "I remember you badgering Kay to read us _Rewards and Fairies_, and then running out of the room because there weren't enough fairies in it."

"It's different when it's Kipling," said Ginty swiftly. She and Peter stared at each other, neither of them sure why they were quarreling but neither prepared to drop it. "Besides, I bet Mitzi couldn't tell Kipling from - from the Old Testament."

"Well, I hope she's grown out of her habit of leaving gates open," said Rowan with an air of finality and pushed her chair back. She leaned over the table, snagging the last two pieces of toast and the last dry curl of bacon and making an impromptu dryish sandwich to sustain herself out in the fields, and was gone.

"I was going to eat that bacon," said Lawrie hurtly.

"I could go and..." Ann began, with a helpful glance towards the pantry.

"No, you couldn't," said Peter, sounding unexpectedly so like their father that Ginty twitched in startlement. "Let her eat bread and scrape like the rest of us. There's no reason for you to be rushing about proffering delicate nothings in a chafing-dish."

Ann looked quenched; but then she said, quite sensibly, "Well, we don't have a chafing-dish anyway, as far as I know. I'm going up to show this letter to Mum and see if she wants some more Lucozade. Was any of the rest of the post hers?"

Ginty thought some of it was. Lawrie shrugged quite cheerfully and started buttering bread and talking about films.

Nicola said nothing at all. On the surface, where she could keep her thoughts in order, she was thinking sensible things about _poor_ Cousin David, and maybe now he'd come back and be in the Navy again; she'd never liked his wife much, and now that the woman was sliding unmournedly out of the family, Nicola found that she couldn't remember her face.

But her thoughts kept turning back on themselves towards Mitzi. She couldn't see how Ann could _possibly_ not _remember_ Cousin Mitzi.

Surely, like a worm in an apple, Cousin Mitzi was one of those experiences you never forgot.

\--

Pounding feet in thin-soled party shoes, across the baked earth of the pocket-handkerchief Hampstead garden. Inside, the grown-ups are talking over tea. Outside, it is life and death. Nicola runs, head down, feet thudding. In front of her she can see the tinselly hem of a party dress, and then a head of dark blonde hair cut in a short bell that its lisping owner had proclaimed to be 'egg-_thactly_ like a bluebell fairy', and then the parched lawn, and then the taffeta skirt of the dress again, all in patches, sewn together by the red blur she sees when she blinks.

It is a very small garden, barely twenty running steps between the French doors and the pond. It feels like two hundred. Not because Nicola is an unhealthy child - though she _hasn't_ outgrown the pallid string-bean look that came with a bout of chicken pox earlier that summer - but because it matters so much.

Her cousin Mitzi balances on the rim of flagstones at the edge of the pond, dancing from foot to foot, jeering. "It's mine, it's mine, I only let you borrow - "

Blue eyes narrowed, Nicola calculates the risk of making a head-on rush and bulldozing Mitzi away from the pond. She'd have tried it with Peter or any of her sisters except Lawrie, who would leap wildly in the wrong direction, crack her head on one of the flagstones and end them up in hospital _again_. She thinks cousin Mitzi falls into the Lawrie category, and however much Nicola would _like_ to settle all this with her head thudding into Mitzi's stomach and knocking all the breath out of her, including the irritating little squeak on which Mitzi ends her sentences, it isn't worth it.

"It's _not_ yours," Nicola says stubbornly. "Cousin David gave it to _me_."

She makes a grab for the thing in Mitzi's hand. Mitzi closes her fist over it, and backs up two steps towards the apple-tree. She holds her fist out over the pond, and simpers. "He was just letting you see."

"He wasn't just letting me see, _he said it was mine to keep_," corrects Nicola. "Like Ginty's paint-box, and Giles's fountain pen."

"No, he didn't."

Even Lawrie doesn't generally resort to a smug flat denial of what Nicola _knows_ is true. Nicola feels a baffled rage start to rise up inside her, making her throat feel hot and thick like the skin round a scab. "Don't tell lies."

"_I'm_ not telling lies. _You're_ telling lies," singsongs Mitzi. She opens her hand, lets the folded piece of cotton inside drop visibly, then snatches her fist shut again.

Nicola's vision dazzles and breaks up like sun on water. She never knows what she _would_ have done next, because a newly-deep-that-summer voice is saying "Here, now, what's this?" and lifting Mitzi down with two large sunburned hands about her beribboned waist.

Nicola stares at her brother Giles' crisp cotton-duck knees, and doesn't trust herself to say anything at all. Mitzi lets loose a regrettable simper. "Nicola wath _thtealing_, Cousin Giles," she informs him in a shocked lisp.

"Nicola should have learnt to share by now, and so should you," says Giles. Nicola's cheeks burst out in an angry flush, as if all the heat in the garden is suddenly centred there. She is too _old_ for babyish lectures about sharing. So should Mitzi be, but Mitzi is as much a stranger to sharing as she is to skinned knees or scarlet fever, or shame. "What's that you've got there?"

"My Nelson thread."

"But it's not - " Giles pauses; looks at Mitzi, looks at Nicola, and then says more slowly. "Yours? Did Cousin David give you a thread too, from the uniform he bought?"

Mitzi clasps her hands behind her back and sticks her stomach out, and nods. Her hair bounces against her neck. It is bobbed in an engaging, story-book-child style, whereas Nicola's is just short. "I wath just showing it to Nicola, and - "

"It looks like you were showing it to the pond," says Giles, voice still full of good humour. "Where's Nicola's, then?"

Mitzi's lower lip sticks out. "Where'th Nicola'th _what_?"

"Nicola's thread from the uniform."

"_Nicola_ didn't _have_ one. There wath only mine that I brought to _show_ her." Mitzi's simper turns to outright triumph as she cocks her head to one side. "_I_ wanted uth _both_ to play with it, but she wath mean and rough and nathty."

"Ah," says Giles.

All Nicola can see of Giles is his shadow; but the shadow moves on the grass as he squares his shoulders, and she is as absolutely comforted as if she had been swept up in strong arms. She _knows_ now that it's all right; that she can look up at Giles' face; that justice will be done. "I think you got confused, Mitzi," he says, and Nicola can hear the smooth places in his voice that weren't there before. "Why don't I take you in and find you some tea, and I'll look after this until later." He folds up the square of cotton with its precious burden and puts it in the breast-pocket of his blazer.

He winks at Nicola over Mitzi's ruffled shoulder as he steers her back indoors. Nicola remains outside, by the pond, by the apple-tree. She stirs the grass with her foot. She knows that things have come all right after all, but still, when she thinks about what Mitzi said, she is filled with a sense of puzzled injustice that rises like the heat from the ground.

\--

The garden at Trennels was much larger than the one in Hampstead. It had become their mother's place by unspoken fiat; and now that they were past the running-and-shouting games stage, none of them went there much, except for Ann who could be relied upon to read decorously and not tread on any delicate creeping thing that had ventured out of its appointed border, and Rowan, whose sense of noblesse oblige sometimes caused her to give a hand with chopping down branches or dealing with the compost heap.

Nicola went there now, in search of privacy. She thought about how her mother's influence was strongest close to the house and faded away as lawn turned into sometime cricket-pitch and then into orchard; like something out of a poem, though she couldn't think quite how.

In the orchard was a well, and around the well was dank grass, and a welcome patch of coolness. Nicola sat on the well's edge and swung her legs. She looked curiously at the rusted mechanism which had once raised and lowered a bucket. She wondered whether restoring it might, p'raps, be the sort of project Peter might like, this summer. Then again, p'raps not; Peter was fonder of working in wood than in metal, and in any case - Nicola looked up at the sky, with its scudding blue clouds, through the branches, and let the thought give tongue to itself - perhaps it might be better to have a project that could be carried on somewhere further from Trennels, and from Mitzi.

She couldn't think why she minded so much about Mitzi coming to stay. But she did. _Perhaps it's going into the Lower Fifth next term_, she thought, a feeble school-joke. _People always do say it's the Lower Fifths that go a bit mental_. Nicola humped her knees up and hugged them, and tried to make herself see that it would have been worse, _much_ worse, if Mitzi had turned up at Kingscote, where people like Miranda would find out about her foul existence, and the likes of Crommie and Keith - well, perhaps not Crommie, but certainly Keith - would take the view that whatever demented thing Mitzi did, Nicola ought to have known about it in advance and stopped it.

_It isn't like anyone's dead_, Nicola told herself sensibly. Even Mitzi's mother was alive and well and presumably slithering off to marry someone else. Perhaps it would be no worse than having the Infant Dodds under one's feet. Perhaps the intervening eight or nine years had turned Mitzi into someone perfectly reasonable; it did happen, Nicola understood.

"Oh, there you are," said Lawrie, eating the last juicy bite of a greengage as she emerged from the sun-dapple between the trees. "Do you want to get the bus into Colebridge and see a film?"

"No."

Undaunted by this, Lawrie boosted herself lithely up onto the edge of the well, and sat in a handkerchief-patch of sun. "They're showing a rerun of _Lady Hamilton_."

"Then _definitely_ no."

"But it's all about Nelson."

"It's the wrong kind of Nelson," said Nicola uncompromisingly.

"I _thought_ you were remembering," crowed Lawrie, giving a boxer's hands-clasped-over-head salute to her own cleverness. "About how Uncle David gave you that thread from Nelson's uniform and Mitzi tried to throw it in the pond. I bet you've got it on you right now, with the rest of your Nelson stuff in that wallet."

"Of course I have." Nicola reached for the wallet, safely tucked into her waistband. She wasn't sure whether Giles had remembered the Mitzi incident when he gave her the wallet to keep her Nelson treasures in.

She wasn't even really sure how it had started. She remembered Uncle David coming to tea, mysteriously invalided out of whatever it was he'd been doing in Naval Intelligence - she already knew that you weren't supposed to ask - with Mitzi looking dislikably smug in a party-frock behind him, and his arms full of parcels; an American tin toy train for Peter, a necklace for twelve-year-old Karen, some others she didn't remember, and the smallest and best of all for Nicola herself, a thread from Nelson's own uniform. Then there was a pause that she supposed must have been filled with tea; then her memories jumped back into precision again, with Mitzi giving her a sideways look and snatching up the folded piece of grey cotton cloth in which the precious thread was folded, and Nicola hearing her father's voice saying _in an emergency, act at once_ and springing after her.

"Let me see," coaxed Lawrie. "They might have Nelson's signature in the film, and I want to see if they do it right."

"Oh, all _right_." Nicola shot a glance at her twin under her lashes. It always made Lawrie feel cosseted to have her possessions praised, as long as she was certain that no one was going to make her give anything away to the praiser, and it might - who knew - be that this was Lawrie's odd way of trying to comfort _her_ for minding about Mitzi coming to visit, since Lawrie always supposed that everyone's feelings worked exactly like her own, when she recognised that anyone else had feelings at all. Nicola boosted herself down and took a couple of prudent steps away from the water, just in case. Lawrie followed.

The wallet came out, its leather bloomed chestnut where it had been polished by rubbing against a succession of pockets. "Here's the thread - I'm not unwrapping it, it's too windy - and the signature that Karen gave me, and this is the Trafalgar prayer - "

"I've got one of those too."

"I know - and the knife made out of the _Victory's_ bowsprit - "

"Wot's bowsprit?" asked Lawrie winningly.

"How can you possibly not know that by now?"

"I do know," said Lawrie very hurtly. "I just thought you might like to tell me."

They stared at each other, each one wondering how any twin of hers could possibly think anything so peculiar.

And then, just as Nicola was considering whether it would be more fun to go to the cinema after all, disaster struck. Rowan emerged through the gate in the high hedge, presumably about some farmerly business in the orchard, with Tessa at her heels. Tessa bounded ecstatically over to Nicola and Lawrie and bounced up at them, full of joy and surprise at not having seen either of them in at least fifteen minutes. Their fingers slipped, and somehow - neither of them ever knew how - the wallet tumbled away into the glancing sun.

Lawrie cried out, fumble-fingered. Nicola made a grab for it as if it were a cricket ball and this were the final of the Form Cup. The wallet turned over, spilling its cargo; and the world came to rest again.

The knife was lying in the dew-studded grass. The wallet was on the very edge of the stones surrounding the well. The prayer and the signature both fluttered away, lifted on the wind like cabbage-white butterflies; Tessa flung herself joyously in pursuit of them, until Rowan whistled her sharply to heel and went to collect them herself.

Nicola picked up the wallet. It felt empty and light, its sides buoyed out by the shapes of the things that lived in it. Lawrie picked up the knife and wiped it down on her skirt before handing it over. "If the prayer was lost, you could have had mine," she offered, sheepishly acknowledging a disaster more or less averted. "You could have _shared_ mine, at any rate."

Nicola said nothing. She leaned over the well and looked into the water. The stones pressed coldly against her belly. The damp grass tickled her ankles. Far, far below, in the cellary depths, she thought she could see something that might have been a drowning square of grey cotton. But it might just have been the light on the water after all.

"M' _really_ sorry," said Lawrie. "It's like it's going down with his ship, isn't it?"

Nicola, tempted to turn round and tear into her, recognised Lawrie doing her best, and recognised, too, that she _couldn't_ let out any of her furious feelings on her poor idiot sister. It would be far better to offer up _Lady Hamilton_ as a sacrifice and let all of her anger be about Alexander Korda.

She turned, and mutely collected the signature and the prayer from Rowan, whose native kindliness was preventing her from actually uttering any of what her good sense had to say concerning how the signature at the very least would have been better off in the farm safe.

"I came to say I'd drive you into Colebridge, if you liked," Rowan said after a pause; and then, stiffly, "You know - Nick - I can't say I ever much liked that woman Cousin David married, but he _was_ a bit of a romancer himself. I don't think Mitzi got _all_ her little ways from her mother, not by a long shot. I'm not saying it wasn't a uniform of more or less the right period, and it probably did see a battle, even if that battle wasn't _necessarily_ Trafalgar, but Gilly always reckoned it looked like it had been made for a bigger man and altered - "

The words, _but he said it was Nelson's_, popped like a bubble on Nicola's tongue.

She remembered Giles saying _but it's not_, all those years ago. She wondered, with a feeling like clenching and unclenching a bruised hand in a pocket to feel how bruised it actually was, how long everyone else had known. Well, not everyone: _Patrick_ had believed her, and Lawrie, who was always willing to believe anything, was staring down the well with an expression of indignant startlement.

The ridiculous thing was, if she'd known from the start, she'd have treasured it anyway; the way, she thought confusedly, that she still liked _Ramage_ even though it wasn't Hornblower. But now it was gone, and there wasn't any sense thinking about it any more. She _didn't_ hope Cousin David would go back into the Navy, now, either. If Nicola were the Navy, she wouldn't have him on a bet.

The path back to the house led through degrees of winding shade, and then through lawn and flowerbeds, and up the conservatory's wrought-iron steps with their bandstand-like balustrade. It was bakingly hot in the conservatory. Tessa frisked around them. Nicola rubbed her behind the ears, and then gave Lawrie a hard, friendly shove, so that Lawrie and Tessa both knew they were forgiven.


End file.
